Jill Marie Holslin

Ma’ said it was right by the Chippewa River, 2023 work in progress

In this series, I am (re)storying my relationship to my Midwest family history and the Minnesota farmland settled by my great-grandparents in the 1880s. They arrived just thirty years after the 1851 Traverse de Sioux Treaty forced the Dakota people off this land and pushed the Ojibwe further north onto the Leech Lake and Red Lake reservations to make way for settlers to claim the land as their own. The title of this series comes from my own mother's recollection of the farm place where her grandparents settled in 1914 and where she was born in 1937. When she was a baby, her family moved into town and they lost touch with the family farm. She told me all she could remember was what her own mother told her. “Ma’ said it was right by the Chippewa River.” Writing ourselves into the history of farmland gives us a sense that settlers have always belonged there, a kind of  "common sense" that erases Indigenous existence. My work in this series makes visible the impacts of the colonial project of claiming land as ceded and no longer Indigenous, At the same time, I bring the rivers and Indigenous place names back into the center of the frame to remind us that our histories are intertwined.